Category Archives:Productivity

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What Working Too Much is Doing to Your Life

From an early age, we’re told that in order to be successful in life, we have to work hard, which often gets interpreted as working long hours.

We hear people say they’ve been “burning the midnight oil” or “doing an all-nighter” in order to achieve a particular outcome.

There is value in having a strong work ethic and doing what’s required to get to where we want to be, but there also has to be a certain level of intelligence as to how we go about it. Working long hours doesn’t always equate to how much we actually get done.

Have you ever been in a situation where you know you’re about to go on a holiday and you have certain things that must get done before you leave? What usually tends to happen?

Oftentimes, the last couple of days before we leave is when we get the most done because we have an unmovable deadline. We somehow manage to become so productive and get things done.

If we can be so productive being we leave for a holiday, it means we have the capability to do that whenever we want. It also means we have to question the need to work long hours consistently.

7 Things You Can Do to Lock in Habits Over the Long Term

How we operate daily is a reflection of the habits we have. The more good habits we have, the better our lives will be.

As we all desire to improve and have better lives, sometimes we struggle to follow through and stick to doing the things we know will be beneficial to us.

While having an intention to make a positive change, such as exercising a few times per week, drinking plenty of water daily or getting enough sleep each night, is a good starting point, sticking to the new habits is challenging.

How to Perform Better While Working so You Can Produce More In Less Time

Our ability to stay focused on anything we’re doing determines the quality of our outputs or results. The better we focus, the better results we’ll produce.

The challenge we all face today is that it’s so easy to get distracted. With so many advances in technology, such as all the different smart devices available to us, being able to stay focused is a major challenge for most people. Unfortunately, our smart devices are making us more distracted than ever before.

Today, distraction removal has become the new focus. The better we’re able to eliminate distractions from our everyday lives, the better we’ll be able to focus.

Focus is a muscle and it’s also a process, which means we can learn how to improve it. An important thing to be aware of is we don’t have focus, we do focus. If focus is something we do, then there are things we can implement to get better at doing it, just like improving any other skill.

There are a number of reasons why improving our focus will be beneficial to us and they include:

Getting more done in a shorter period of time.

Producing better quality outputs.

Creating more free time as a result of being more effective.

Feeling less stressed or overwhelmed.

Being happier and in a better mood.

Learning how to focus better is now a critical skill if we want to have a better quality life.

Things You Can Do to Live More and Work Less

I’ll admit this is an area I struggle with as I tend to work more than I should. Over the past couple of years, I’ve taken steps to change my habit of working too much.

We’re in a global culture of being busy. Whenever we say we’re busy, it’s like a badge of honour because it makes us feel we’re important and we actually matter. We also use being busy as an excuse not to pursue what we really want to do in life.

If we ask most people what they’re busy with, it almost always comes down to day-to-day responsibilities and working to make ends meet. The truth is most people are busy doing work they would rather not be doing. So we get caught in this trap of being busy, doing work that’s not inspiring or fulfilling, which takes us away from what we’d rather be doing.

5 Signs You’re a Workaholic

You spend a lot more time working than originally planned, which cuts into your evenings and weekends.

You put your work before other areas of your life like health, relationships or family.

You use work as a distraction not to face the real issues or challenges going on in your life.

You free up time, that is, give up your leisure time, so you can do more work.

You are highly stressed and fatigued, which generates feelings of anxiety, frustration and overwhelm.

It’s time to stop working ourselves to the ground and break the workaholism trap.

Things You Must Avoid if You Want Next Year to be Your Best Year Yet

Has this ever happened to you? You get to the end of a year and wonder, “What happened this year?” or “What did I actually achieve this year?”

You had started the year with a lot of enthusiasm and hoped that this would be “the year” in which you had big breakthroughs and moved your life forward in a big way. However, things may not have worked out the way you wanted and now you feel like you’ve not made any significant progress over the past year.

If you’re like me, then you know that feeling we’ve not made any real progress in our lives can be demotivating and cause us to question whether we have what it takes to achieve what matters most to us.

The bad news is unless we’re aware of what may have caused us to fall short in achieving what we wanted, it’s very likely we’ll do the same things again and achieve similar type of results this year.

The good news is things can be different. By becoming aware of certain mistakes that prevented us from achieving what we wanted this past year, we can make the changes necessary and achieve big breakthroughs this year.

What is a Big Breakthrough?

A breakthrough means achieving an outcome that will make a significant improvement or bring forth a major benefit in our lives. As we’re all different and have different priorities, what we consider to be breakthroughs may be different.

For example, for one person, earning an additional $50,000 in one year may be a significant breakthrough, whereas for another person, that figure may not be a big deal at all.